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Joel on TAOUP

Joel Spolsky takes a look at esr's The Art of Unix Programming.

Let's look at a small example. The Unix programming culture holds in high esteem programs which can be called from the command line, which take arguments that control every aspect of their behavior, and the output of which can be captured as regularly-formatted, machine readable plain text. Such programs are valued because they can easily be incorporated into other programs or larger software systems by programmers. To take one miniscule example, there is a core value in the Unix culture, which Raymond calls "Silence is Golden," that a program that has done exactly what you told it to do successfully should provide no output whatsoever. It doesn't matter if you've just typed a 300 character command line to create a file system, or built and installed a complicated piece of software, or sent a manned rocket to the moon. If it succeeds, the accepted thing to do is simply output nothing. The user will infer from the next command prompt that everything must be OK.[...]

So you get these religious arguments. Unix is better because you can debug into libraries. Windows is better because Aunt Madge gets some confirmation that her email was actually sent. Actually, one is not better than another, they simply have different values: in Unix making things better for other programmers is a core value and in Windows making things better for Aunt Madge is a core value.[...]

Raymond does attempt to compare and contrast Unix to other operating systems, and this is really the weakest part of an otherwise excellent book, because he really doesn't know what he's talking about. Whenever he opens his mouth about Windows he tends to show that his knowledge of Windows programming comes mostly from reading newspapers, not from actual Windows programming. That's OK; he's not a Windows programmer; we'll forgive that. As is typical from someone with a deep knowledge of one culture, he knows what his culture values but doesn't quite notice the distinction between parts of his culture which are universal (killing old ladies, programs which crash: always bad) and parts of the culture which only apply when you're programming for programmers (eating raw fish, command line arguments: depends on audience).

There are too many monocultural programmers who, like the typical American kid who never left St. Paul, Minnesota, can't quite tell the difference between a cultural value and a core human value. [...]

Joel often seems to have basically interesting ideas and then to mix in a lot of chaff that's either obvious or oversimplified. Having made a basically good point about the cultural differences between Windows and Unix, he seems to assume that the cultures are entirely fixed and unchanging, and Unix will never get a good GUI. This is more or less like self-righteous American car companies in the 60s assuming that Japanese cars are will always be cheap, unreliable and nasty.

Honda/Acura NSX 2005 model preview

You need to distinguish the core values (solidity, reuse) from their accidental expressions (preference for command-line tools, terseness.) Sadly neither Joel nor ESR do this very well at the moment. It is still an open question how to make graphical components that can be recombined as fluidly as unix pipes, but perhaps we will know in ten years.

As an example, some number of free software programs are developing excellent log/debug/trace frameworks. distcc is one of them: many releases have discovered bugs either in distcc, gcc or the kernel that could not have been reproduced on my machine. The trace mechanism turned on by DISTCC_VERBOSE=1 is good enough that in almost every case I've been able to work out what was wrong and prepare a fix by looking at the log file. (OK, in some difficult cases looking at it for a long time.)

This is a small departure from traditional Unix terseness but I think a valuable one. I don't claim to be the first person to do things this way but I do think it's an evolution based on the core values of wanting to help a technical user and being good to developers. Contrast it to the classic Windows system log message: "The operation failed because: Success."

Does it help Joel's auntie? No, but then she probably doesn't need a distributed compiler anyhow. Does it help, say, Joel's niece who's getting into Linux for the first time by installing Gentoo? Yes, it just might. If you called it "progressive disclosure" you'd start to sound like a UI designer, or enough to fool a bearded unix-head anyhow.

I agree that it is a real weakness of esr's book that he doesn't really understand any of the other systems he talks about, or why they might be good. The Practice of Programming does much better in this regard.

Tim has some thoughts on this too.

posted Tue 16 Dec 2003 in /books/taoup | link

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